Lesson 758 – Guess what? Stinky butt.

There is an article on NPR about the how urban chicken farmers are using “chicken diapers.”  While the overall consensus of the commenters is that this is a foolish thing to do, even prompting one commenter to remark that we have “officially jumped the shark,” I beg to differ.

When Charlie lived in our house for about 6 months (we had gotten her as a newborn in January and by the time she was old enough to face a freezing winter, she had become a family pet) I tried everything I could to toilet train her. I tried clicker, paper, and treat training.

I even tried the diapers.

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Lesson 757 – Man, that’s potent stuff

I mentioned yesterday that we had our chickens out in the yard this weekend while we were making the transition from the mess of winter to spring.

Branches that had fallen from ice storms were picked up and leaves too stubborn to release during last fall, but had finally decided to let go were raked. Of course, all this raking and moving opened up a whole world of yummy goodness for our birds.

Our hens foraged for hours and stuffed themselves on bugs, worms, and, in one particular bird’s (Charlie) case, the remnants of a sandwich inadvertently left at chicken level.

Marc and I took on the task of digging out the enclosed coop area.  In the winter we don’t do anything other than keep adding wood chips to the henhouse and yard. This, of course means that in the spring when we do finally attend to this task, we have to dig out close to a foot of compressed, decomposing food, poop, and chicken waste.